Gearbox founder and CEO Randy Pitchford didn't extra feel pressure to create a successful film in light of other big video game adaptations when making Lionsgate's upcoming Borderlands movie – in fact, he felt quite the opposite.
"I feel validated. You know, when I started this, the first meeting that Avi Arad – our incredible producer – and I took with RA was in 2011, 13 years ago, and I beat him up for a couple of years. It was the longest courtship ever before I agreed to develop this thing with him. But back then, the expected value was that you can't do a video game movie and expect it to do anything," Pitchford tells GamesRadar+. "And now we have a world where all kinds of interesting adaptations are wildly successful, not just video games, but toys. We saw what they did with Lego and what they did with Barbie. Because here's the thing, what we want from a film has nothing to do with the source medium, it's about feelings, and experiences and characters. And it's fun to be taken to a place we can never imagine in our normal world. And a movie can take us there."
